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Sunday, 25 August 2013

THE OLD ENGLISHword above holds inside it many meanings. It is a
going, a journey, a way, a journeying, an expedition, a road, a
passing, a course, a march, a voyage, a path; it
is
a place where passage is possible, a thoroughfare, an entrance; it
is
that in which a journey or voyage is made - a vehicle, vessel,
carriage, ship, ark; it
is a
body of persons who journey, a crew; it
can also mean fear,
peril, danger, sudden, intense and
beautiful.

This
word can conjure others too if you look at it long enough: it could
be the just-out-of-sight otherworld of færy;
it
could be a gathering of festive merriments from afar – a
fair, or
the gift one would give to another at such an occasion – a
fairing (which
word also describes a part of the structure of a vessel of travel put
there in order to streamline its passage and reduce drag);
it
could be fear,
it could be far;
it could be for;
it
could be fair
– alluding to both beauty and justice.

We
see its bloodline in the word fare,
which is a merging of fær
and
Old English faru
– companions, baggage. Fare
can mean the
price required for passage,
or indeed food,
a meal, nourishment; its
old sense of travelling
and
being lives
on when we say farewell,
and
in words like seafaring and wayfaring.

For
some years I had the word wayfarer
on my business card alongside the other words which try to describe
in a small way what I am doing here on this earth. I've always liked
the word; it encompasses my love of nomadic dwellings and of
wandering the byways, but also for me it paints a suitably vague yet
accurate picture of the way we pass through life. All of us are
wayfarers.

[The
way
part
of the word is also Old English: from Old Englishweg
- road,
path, course of travel,
from Proto-Germanic *wegaz (cf. Old Saxon, Dutch weg,
Old Icelandic, Old Norse vegr,
Old Frisian wei,
Old High German weg,
German Weg,
Gothic wigs
– way),
from Proto Indo-European *wegh- to
move. And, incidentally, ways
are timbers on which a ship is built, the sense stemming from the
older meaning of “channels in the body”.]

(~ information
gathered from the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology)

So
you can imagine how interested I was to hear that Penguin - as a
promotion for Robert McFarlane's book The Old Ways - were
running a competition to hire a wayfarer
to walk the tracks of Britain this summer and write about it along
the way. In another less busy incarnation I would have entered
myself, but was happy to follow the wayfarings of the person who did
win the competition with the submission of a short film and an essay.

Her
name was Sarah Thomas, and with her Wayfaring came this way many, if
not all, of those linguistic fær-scents
mentioned above, and a tale-thread that entails itself like a
blessing-knot on an old story-string that has hung by my side for a
long time.

You
see, our paths had crossed before, in many ways, though not yet in
this way. In past chapters of our lives, our tales had plaited their
yarns together, without our ever yet meeting.

But
to begin with I didn't know this. Sarah Thomas the wayfarer was just
Sarah Thomas the wayfarer – a traveller, film-maker, writer,
observer, whose beautiful words and images I read with delight and
interest as she went along. She walked northern paths in July and
left word on her blog, for followers to read. I invited her to stop
by for tea should her paths wend this far south, assuming they may
not.

But
the more I followed her words back in time, the more bells began to
ring in me. Clues amongst her earlier tales made me wonder. Places
and names and details all conspired in my mind to bring me to a
realisation that she was in fact a person I had known without
knowing: she and I had both, at different times, been with the same
partner.

This
was not a simple and straightforward realisation. For me that
relationship had been difficult, traumatic and deeply damaging. This
man who had been a part of both our lives had a kind of madness which
has caused far-reaching disturbance through my heart and psyche. In
those days, Sarah was an ex-girlfriend of his, with a different name,
someone I only knew of through his (not always rational)
descriptions, and whom I undoubtedly found intimidating.

Now,
by the side of Sarah Thomas The Wayfarer had stepped up another woman
with another name, and she stood there carrying many heavy bags of
memories, asking me to believe that they were one and the same
person.

I
wrote to her again, reiterating the invitation to tea, tenfold,
commenting that we may have a great deal to talk about! Sarah
wrote back, touched. It seemed we had crossed paths several times in
the days since our shared connection was long gone, but she had been
too shy to say hello (thanks to yet more inaccurate second-hand
descriptions and stories), and I had not known who she was.

Her
wayfaring brought her to Devon. And so we met by a river, and it was
like meeting someone I'd known for aeons without yet seeing her face.
We fell immediately to talking about thises and thats as the hours
threatened to eat up the daylight. We knew then, I think, that this
was a profound and incandescent connection which would birth
wayfarings of its own, and unleash a long-awaited healing.

Our
next days turned into weeks, with Sarah adventuring on Dartmoor
inbetween even further-reaching travels which took place inside our
conversations. This journey was not just on foot – the voyage was
made in a spirit-ship on old waters; it followed a barefoot earthen
path through the moonlit forests of our hearts, meted out in ashen
truth-stones; our map was hand-wrought on the skins of sorrowful
beasts; each of us had pegged out waymarkers for the other.

We
laughed a ridiculous amount, we cried. We walked and swam and sat and
danced, and most of all, we talked. It feels as if we've only barely
begun to form the first syllables of long long sentences, though we
have talked through many hours. There in this bowl we share rest many
beautiful things, not least among them is a trust born of I don't
know what, and the steps to thought-dances we thought we were alone
in learning.

In
the middle of these days, came the Uncivilisation Festival, and Sarah
came too, riding in the back of our van to the throng of fire and
rain and story. Tom and I have felt thoroughly blessed to have such a
lovely visitor, with whom we can share space without difficulty, and
jokes without censure. She is one of those people you meet very
occasionally in life from whom a familiar bloodfirelight shines, a
companion on the beautiful roads and the brambled.

It
is rare that I share my deeply personal stories here on this blog,
for reasons many and various, and, I hope, obvious. But this one
feels like it also belongs in part to all those who have suffered
silently in the cages of unwell relationships, as a reminder that
there is goodness and strength and renewed enchantment to be found
woven in the threads of this sisterhood-cloth which could so easily
have been lost. Also, it is a lovely tale.

Sarah's
wayfaring has taken her on from here for now, and before too long it
will bring her to her husband and home in Iceland, land of this old
language we speak, land of old story, land still crackling with
un-buried magic. One day, we will make our way north to meet again
there, and the wayfaring will go on, the road a yarn weaving together
pasts and presents and futures, hearts and places and arts and dreams
and people.

Once
a student of linguistics and languages, if I play too long with
words, I can find new threads to connect them...

Thursday, 8 August 2013

IN A WOODEN TRUNK in our living room there lives a witch. She has been
there, folded up amongst candle stubs and bits of string since last
summer when I made her to walk the forested edges of the
Uncivilisation Festival. But a whole year has passed; we are now
preparing for this year's festival and I realise I've not yet
recounted the tale of her beginning. And not only that, but she
belongs to a precious seam of a particular kind of
firelit-storied-liminal-uncomfortable-half-remembered-old-magic that
I'd like to explore here.

The
stories Tom and I tell seem to delve into a particular stratum of the
mythic diaspora. We favour the dark and Slavic, the old, peasanty,
and somewhat nonsensical, the oxblooded, iron-toothed stories that
twang in us an ancient note on some bone-harp of the soul, strung
with the silver hairs from the tail of an ice-being from the north.

Tom as
the storyteller holds the whole tale together, weaving the thread of
words and silence and joy and sorrow and wonder from beginning to
end, summoning the spirits of the story to dwell there with us for a
time, and keeping the listeners present and participating. My role is
as a kind of illustrator: I embellish the narrative with music – on
accordion and other instruments – conjuring the right mood,
painting the soundscape underneath the words. And I illustrate with
imagery too, whether it is a painted silhouette-backdrop or lantern
projection, my inclination is to want to make a visual element for
the performance too, and since we so often tell our tales outdoors
beside a fire underneath the stars (the best venue in my opinion),
playing with light and shadow seems to be the way of things.

You'll
remember the year before last I made a rudimentary projection of Baba
Yaga's chicken-legged hut to accompany our Russian folktale –
Ivashko Medvedko - Little Ivan, Bear-Child – from an old
magic lantern lens, a shoe box, some gaffer tape and a torch.

At last
year's Uncivilisation Festival we ventured much farther east than
usual and told a story from the Chukchi peninsular – right at the
far end of Siberia – Tai Pat and Left Side Morning Dawn.
This one was strange and frightening, a kind of incantation. There
were images in the story which were dark and uncomfortable and which
we were worried might frighten or offend. There was a man made of
shit, there was an enormous woman-shaman's tongue which chased the
protagonists through many worlds, there was a pit of grubs fed on
human teeth into which the hero was thrown. Altogether, as the
evening of the performance approached, we became quite apprehensive
as to what on earth it would be like!

We even felt the need to put up
a weirdness warning for those with young children.

For this
story I played a strange array of percussive instruments which I'd
hung from a wooden frame of sticks lashed together – bells of metal
and ceramic and wood, ocarinas, drums, shakers, a jew's harp and a
re-tuned zither. And for the light-and-shadow, I made a kind of
shamanic map of the story, based on the Saami Shamans' painted drums.
This was fixed to the skin of a drum which held a torch inside it.

The story
went well in the end, nobody was offended or terrified. It was an odd
but necessary thing to do I think. Tom told the whole thing in a mask
he'd made with bits of sheep's wool and a squirrel tail as
attachments, which was intense.

This year
we will be telling a Lithuanian story – The Sun Princess &
The Fortieth Door – returning to the more familiar folktale
structure, though drawing on a culture that boasts the oldest
surviving Indo-European language. This one we told last Saturday
under a large oak tree on a beautiful piece of common land in a
local Dartmoor town. There was fire and an audience, and a beautiful
wind-swept sunset, though the lack of darkness meant that the lamplit
imagery wasn't seen to its full effect.

For this one I have made
lanterns from two metal frames and some old perspex I found in our
local recycling centre. The four sides of each lantern hold images
from the story, illustrated in glass paint so that light will shine
through them. I had never used glass paint before, and making images
that don't look like a five-year-old has painted them with nail
varnish is nigh on impossible, so the shapes had to be kept simple
and bold, and the colours far brighter than I am used to. The final
effect is quite pleasing though, and for our late-night telling at
this year's Uncivilisation Festival, they will glow to their full
potential.

11pm – midnight

The Sun Princess and the Fortieth Door

This year, Tom Hirons and Rima Staines bring you a Lithuanian folktale from beyond the nine mountains and the nine forests. This is a feast of a tale. Twenty-eight old men are kept in a dungeon with a heart-shaped window. Thrice-nine iron doors bar their escape. Who keeps them trapped? Who can rescue them? Featuring cosmic princesses, giants, witches, a three-eyed goat and more, this really is a humdinger. Don’t miss it. At the smaller firepit, by the pizza oven.

~ from the Uncivilisation programme 2013

The
afore-mentioned witch was made to be one of the boundary-walking
characters of Mearcstapa – a troupe of folk involved in the
festival last year, of which we were members – who had been given a
fool's license to creep around the edges of proceedings, unsettling
and enchanting by turns. We all chose our own character, with a loose
collective idea to portray spirits of the land, characters of myth
and folklore who had perhaps just stepped out from under the hill.

I guess
readers of this blog won't be particularly surprised that the
character I made was a hag. I have had long-held interest in
puppetry, with a head-full of ideas for puppets I want to make and
yet so far not many actual creations to my name. This project allowed
me to endulge my interest and make the character who crops up in so
many of my paintings come to life and wander about in the woods
unsettling people.

I also
got the chance to sculpt, which despite being the daughter of two
sculptors, I do very rarely.

I began
by building up a mound of modelling plastiline or “American clay”
on a board.

And
shaping it gradually into the familiar long-chinned, hook-nosed witch
of our folktales and nightmares.

It was
pretty solid material and hard to work with, but the solidity was
necessary for the next papier mâché stage.

Once her
face was there, I slathered her all over in vaseline and began to
build up layers of papier mâché with small torn pieces of blank
newsprint and watered down PVA glue.

This took
a long time, as each layer needed to dry before the next was applied.

Eventually
I decided the papier mache was probably thick enough, and so I
removed the whole head, clay and all from the board. Slowly the hard
plastilene had to be dug out from the back of the mask, without
damaging it. And there she was, a white witch ready for paint.

She was
painted with watercolour, just giving her skin a tint rather than
covering the interesting patchwork torn paper effect, which I liked.

And then
the eyes!

I have
had a handful of eyeballs in a drawer for some years. They were given
to me by a friend of my parents who used to work at Madame Tussauds
as head of portraiture, after she retired. So I think these are
pretty high quality glass eyeballs – half-size for children or
puppets!

It's
amazing how they immediately bring the witch frighteningly to life!

She was
completed by the addition of an enormous piece of cloth, large enough
to cover me, stitched to the edge of her face, and two crossed sticks
were fixed inside the back of her head for operating. Not to mention
a necklace of chickens' feet (Real! Tom brought them home from a pet
supplies shop – they are commonly sold as dog treats!), and some
old disintegrated white leather gloves which had been accidentally
put through the wash by a friend and passed on to me – excellent
witch-hands!

Whilst
making this hag, I reflected on the kind of hag-face I'd created: a
wide-cheekboned, hook-nosed, long-chinned witch. A typical hag of the
woods, whom we'd all recognise as the child-devouring “baddie” in
a tale. Somehow the shape of her face conjures a deep and real
nightmareish fear in us which we can't really explain. Indeed showing
her to friends did cause several terrified upsets in their children!
I began to wonder about our different archetypal dream-maps and
pondered on whether this particular kind of face would conjure a
similar fear in people from all cultures or whether I was depicting a
specifically European shadow-archetype. Do the devils and terrors of
other parts of the world have different fear-inducing facial structures and roles
to play in the tales, or was there something deeper even than
cultural differences in the hag I'd made which was causing the
children to scream?

At the
festival by day she sat in the crook of a tree, hung all about with
bones from a horse skeleton, and candles in jars. By night, she took
up wandering the festival's edges and surprising and unnerving people
who came across her where they least expected it. I walked about
holding her face in front of me, operating its movement by means of
the sticks in the back of the mask. The large piece of cloth covered
me entirely, and so the shape of my hidden head became like a kind of
hag-hump. In my pocket, I had a small speaker which played a
recording of an old woman from (I think) Latvia, telling stories from
her life, occasionally breaking into wobbly song, or even tears as
she recalled terrible and sad events that she'd lived through. I
bought the recording in a second-hand shop years ago and have since
lost all the information about it, possessing only the digital files,
so until my hag bumps into a native speaker of her mutterings, I'll
never know.

What I
found fascinating was how it was to be inside the hag.
I could see very badly through the weave of the cloth, which made
walking without stumbling pretty difficult, unless there was some
light. But on occasion I was able to observe people's reactions to
meeting the hag. Sometimes they were uncomfortable, sometimes they
laughed, sometimes they just watched her, on many occasions I heard
them say “respects to the hag”, which in a strange way, I found
very moving.

Once, the hag fell over a log in a most ungainly fashion, landing heavily
in the laps of some concerned people sitting around the fire!

On
the saturday night, all the Mearcstapa edge-walkers
converged on the fire circle where Wod
were playing up a mesmeric Brythonic storm with their wonderful and
truly en-trance-ing
music, and I sat there, inside the hag, on a log, watching the circle
dancing, faces firelit and lost to the dance, the occasional
silhouetted pair of antlers passing by in the throng, simultaneously
glad and baffled at the kinds of things I end up doing, but mostly
very awed by the real magic that can be made with the tools of
masquerade and certain kinds of un-selfconscious folk-ritual.

The
Dark Mountain Project and its Uncivilisation Festivals were created
as a space for the stories we tell about our lives to be re-shaped,
picked apart and passed on; a space to bring our despair at the
Earth's destruction and all kinds of responses to it – creative,
emotional, rational, irrational, beautiful, ugly, honest; a space to
meet others of like minds or wildly disparate views who nevertheless
share a desire to find common byways branching off the roads of the
Endtimes, beside which might be found composting skeletons of
civilisation, medicinal weeds, rabbit-holes to the otherworld, or
weather-beaten travellers with craneskin bags of the real stories we
need now.

This year's is to be the last Uncivilisation Festival, with the project taking
its energy now into new and fresh ventures around the country like
The Telling and
Carrying The Fire. The
wonderful books will continue to be published.

The festival programme is spilling over with wonderful weird and
wild happenings. (Some choice picks from Paul Kingsnorth here).

For
me, I think the treasures I've found at these gatherings have been
the most unusual and interesting fireside conversations I've ever
been part of, and true friends made. Also, there's a great joy for me
in finding others who also delight in the brambled, harlequin margins
of things without also shying from the necessary darkness there is to
be found there.

I
still get very nervous when performing, and am reflecting at the
moment on whether this challenge is one that needs to be faced
head-on or side-stepped. Life in general is very intense for me, and
so experiences like these where I am centre-stage are almost
unbearable in their intensity. I am wondering whether the way round
it is to hide inside a hag or behind a shadow-puppet screen, my art
only being seen once it has left me, and therefore being the thing
which draws folks' eyes rather than me.

In
the same way that certain fungi can thrive on petrochemical-saturated
land and subsequently decontaminate it, it feels like the descent
into the mushroomy hag-realm where our deepest darkest kidney-fear of moulds
and munching grubs and the things we don't want to think about dwell
is a necessary one.

I'm
sure that from this cauldron of hag-stones and folktales and
half-remembered nightmares and performance nerves and ecocide-grief
and firelight and painted magic, we'll manage to pull a thread of
mycellial wonder which will make good light-filled compost for the next new seeds.

About Me

Rima Staines is an artist using paint, wood, word, music, animation, clock-making, puppetry & story to attempt to build a gate through the hedge that grows along the boundary between this world & that. Her gate-building has been a lifelong pursuit, & she hopes to have perhaps propped aside even one spiked loop of bramble (leaving a chink just big enough for a mud-kneeling, trusting eye to glimpse the beauty there beyond), before she goes through herself.

Always stubborn about living the things that make her heart sing, Rima lives with her partner Tom and their young son in Hedgespoken - an offgrid home and travelling theatre built on a vintage Bedford RL truck.

Rima’s inspirations include the world & language of folktale; faces of people who pass her on the street; folk music & art of Old Europe & beyond; peasant & nomadic living; magics of every feather; wilderness & plant-lore; the margins of thought, experience, community & spirituality; & the beauty in otherness.

Crumbs fall from Rima’s threadbare coat pockets as she travels, & can be found collected here, where you may join the caravan.